Others suggested it was a place known for “illicit” parties involving
alcohol - something that would not be illegal in Baghdad. But in strict
Sunni or Shia areas some residents might describe such a place as a
brothel whether it was or was not. [. . .] The three Americans may have been
caught up in one of the periodic sweeps of Baghdad by the Shia militias,
who can be as violent as their Sunni jihadist counterparts. In one raid
18 months ago, 25 women were shot dead by militiamen who raided a house
said to have been used as a brothel in the east of the city.

Charges of a bordello should always be considered charges and not
reality unless it's confirmed. If you want to smear your enemies (or
justify killing them), militias know the easiest way is to insist the
site was a "brothel."

Of the three Americans, FOX NEWS notes, "One of the Americans is a woman, The Wall Street Journal reports.A
police official identified the woman as Iraqi-American Russel Furat. An
Iraqi military official told the newspaper the two men kidnapped are
Iraqi-American Wael al-Mahdawy and Egyptian-American Amro Mohammed."

On THE NEWSHOUR (PBS -- link is text, audio and video) tonight, anchor Judy Woodruff noted the events.JUDY WOODRUFF: A key Sunni figure strongly condemned the growing wave of abductions.ABDUL-LATIF AL-HIMAIM, Head of Sunni Endowment,
Iraq (through interpreter): We reject any kidnap operation. We fully
support the government, stability and security. We absolutely condemn
and reject anyone who violates the law and disturbs security and
stability. We denounce outlawed acts and kidnappings. Such acts are
rejected from any party.

W.G. Dunlap (AFP) offers, "Kidnappers have recently seized Qataris and Turks, but it has been years
since Americans were abducted, and it is Iraqis who have suffered the
most from kidnappers seeking ransoms or to settle scores."

Erin Cunningham (WASHINGTON POST) reviews last week's violence and notes, "Then, on Tuesday, the bullet-riddled bodies of two journalists for
Iraq’s Al-Sharqiya TV, a news channel seen as sympathetic to Iraq’s
Sunnis, were found outside Muqdadiyah. Sharqiya executives said Shiite
militias had killed the reporters at a checkpoint." Last week, Fred Lambert (UPI) reported on one of the other major attacks, "Shia militiamen conducted reprisal attacks against local Sunnis in
Muqdadiya, Iraq, following a double bombing Monday that killed at least
20 people. The blasts occurred in a cafe and mainly killed and injured
militiamen with the Hashid Shaabi, or Popular Mobilization Forces, an Iran-trained Shia Muslim group fighting in Iraq against the Islamic State."

Today, the US Defense Dept announced:Strikes in IraqAttack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 25
strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq’s government:-- Near Kisik, three strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed an ISIL fighting position.-- Near Mosul, 10 strikes struck four separate ISIL tactical
units, an ISIL communications facility, and an ISIL-used culvert and
destroyed five ISIL fighting positions, two ISIL assembly areas, two
ISIL weapons caches, and an ISIL excavator. -- Near Ramadi, eight strikes struck an ISIL tactical unit and
destroyed an ISIL vehicle-borne bomb, an ISIL vehicle, an ISIL tactical
vehicle, an ISIL command and control node, an ISIL building, cratered
two ISIL-used roads, and denied ISIL access to terrain.-- Near Sinjar, one strike destroyed an ISIL vehicle.-- Near Qayyarah, three strikes struck two ISIL-used culverts and denied ISIL access to terrain.

Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic
events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a
single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a
single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle
is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons
against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for
example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or
impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not
report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number
of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual
munition impact points against a target.

Where is the plan?

Hillary Clinton's been claiming she has a plan. She made that claim
again Sunday night during the Democratic Party's debate moderated by NBC
News' Lester Holt and Andrea Mitchell and featuring Clinton and other
contenders for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination -- Bernie
Sanders and Martin O'Malley.

MITCHELL: You mentioned Syria. Let me ask you about Syria, all of
you. Let's turn to Syria and the civil war that has been raging there. Are
there any circumstances in which you could see deploying significant
numbers of ground forces in Syria, not just specials forces but
significant ground forces to combat ISIS in a direct combat role? Let me start with you Secretary Clinton. CLINTON: Absolutely not.I
have a three point plan that does not include American Ground forces.
It includes the United States leading an air coalition which is what
we're doing, supporting fighters on the ground; the Iraqi Army which is
beginning to show more ability, the Sunni fighters that we are now
helping to reconstitute and Kurdish on both sides of the border.

I
think we also have try to disrupt their supply chain of foreign
fighters and foreign money and we do have to contest them in online
space. So I'm very committed to both going after ISIS but also
supporting what Secretary Kerry is doing to try to move on a political
diplomatic to try to begin to slow down and hopefully end the carnage in
Syria which is the root of so many of the problems that we seen in the
region and beyond.

Defeating ISIS. ISIS and the foreign terrorist fighters
it recruits pose a serious threat to America and our allies. We will
confront
and defeat them in a way that builds greater stability across the
region, without miring our troops in another misguided ground war.
Hillary will empower
our partners to defeat terrorism and the ideologies that drive it,
including
through our ongoing partnership to build Iraqi military and governing capacity, our commitment to
Afghanistan’s democracy and security, and by supporting efforts to restore stability to Libya and Yemen.

Is that her three-part plan?

That's all she's got at her website and it's a tiny paragraph in the midst of her national security page.

What would Senator Bernie Sanders do?

He declared, "We should -- we should learn -- we should learn from King Abdullah of
Jordan, one of the few heroes in a very unheroic place. And what
Abdullah said is this is a war with a soul of Islam and that Muslim
troops should be on the ground with our support and the support of other
major countries. That is how we destroy ISIS, not with American troops
in perpetual warfare."

Seriously?

That's his 'left' answer?

Not one word about diplomacy?

Not one word about needing to address the persecution of the Sunnis in Iraq?

Like Bernie, Barack Obama also misses this point about the need to
address the persecution of Sunnis in Iraq. Friday, the White House
issued the following:

January 15, 2015 | The White House | Office of the Press Secretary

President Obama today convened
his National Security Council to discuss the intensification of our campaign to
degrade and destroy ISIL. The President was briefed on recent progress by Iraqi
security forces in taking back Ramadi, and on ways we and our partners in the
Global Coalition to Counter ISIL continue to accelerate and integrate the
military campaign on all possible fronts in Iraq and Syria.

The President directed his
national security team to continue to intensify ongoing efforts to degrade and
destroy ISIL, including by working with our partners to increase our military
cooperation, disrupting foreign fighter networks, halting ISIL expansion
outside of Syria and Iraq, countering ISIL financing, disrupting any ISIL
external plotting efforts, and countering ISIL's propaganda and messaging. The
President emphasized that degrading and destroying ISIL will continue to
require coordination and cooperation among a wide range of global partners, and
the United States is strongly committed to continuing to lead the shared efforts
of the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL.

The current prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, also a Shiite, has given
much lip service to inclusion but has made little headway in changing
Iraq’s sectarian equation. “All these things have to move in harmony.
. . . You can’t simply focus on the military and ignore political
factors,” said the senior administration official, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments.
“Our diplomats are working day in and day out” on Iraqi political
reconciliation, the official said, “but in some ways it is even more
difficult. . . . These are existential questions that the Iraqis are
asking themselves.”

The diplomats are working very hard, are they?

So Barack got his Iran deal but didn't think to secure the release of American hostages.

Meanwhile the Iraqi government does as it damn well pleases despite
years of promises to institute reconciliation and Barack just hands over
anything to them.

It's difficult, the official told Karen DeYoung.

It's not that difficult.

Iraq wants a weapons sale worth $800 million?

That's a want.

The White House then tosses out their want.

The Iraqi government has to give a little or there's no deal.

That's what deal making is, that's what diplomacy is.

In June of 2014, Barack publicly declared that the only answer to Iraq's crises was a political solution.

Yet in August of 2014, he started bombing Iraq.

He used the US military, his envoy and the State Dept to work on more military means.

And there's been no progress on the political front.

None at all.

In "The debate (Iraq)" at Third last night, we gave Hillary credit for telling some truth:

At one point, we were all booing.

Three candidates on the stage and they were all lying.

All pimping and whoring for imperialism.

Then to our surprise, one slipped in just a tiny bit of honesty.

Just a tiny bit.

And just one.[. . .]As Hillary briefly notes, "If there is any blame to be spread around, it
starts with the prime minister of Iraq, who sectarianized his military,
setting Shia against Sunni."

Who would that be?

Nouri al-Maliki.

And if the blame "starts with the prime minister," it actually starts with Barack Obama.

Nouri did what Hillary's alluding to during his second term.

He didn't win a second term at the polls.

The White House -- Barack Obama -- gifted him with a second term via a legal contract (The Erbil Agreement).

Former Governor Martin O'Malley had a strong moment during the Islamic State section of the debate:

We need to learn the lessons from the past. We do need to provide the
special -- special ops advisers, we need -- do need to provide the
technical support, but over the long-term, we need to develop new
alliances. We need a much more proactive national security strategy that
reduces these threats before they rise to a level where it feels like
we need to pull for a division of marines.

And I also want to
add one other thing here. I appreciate the fact that in our debate, we
don't use the term you hear Republicans throwing around trying to look
all vibrato (ph) and macho sending other kids -- kids into combat, they
keep using the term boots on the ground. A woman in Burlington, Iowa
said to me, "Governor, when you're with your colleagues, please don't
refer to my son who has served two tours of duty in Iraq as a pair of
boots on the ground." Now, we need to be mindful of learning the lessons
of the past.

Please don't refer to my son who has served two tours of duty in Iraq as a pair of boots on the ground.

It's a message the Prime Minister of Australia clearly did not receive. SKY NEWS reports:

Prime
Minister Malcolm Turnbull has made the case in Washington that the Iraqi
people won't accept coalition boots on the ground in the fight to
defeat Islamic State militants.'The destruction of ISIL requires
a military solution - it requires boots on the ground,' Mr Turnbull
said in a keynote speech to the Centre for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington on Monday afternoon (US time).'But they must be the right boots on the right ground.'